“In its mixture of direct physical engagement and relaxed, aesthetic awareness, the walk serves as an ideal vehicle for the poet who wishes to evoke the world in both its seductive beauty and its obstinate solidity.’ (20)
- Roger Gilbert Walks in the World (1991)
“Time was first reckoned by lunations, and every important ceremony took place at a certain phase of the moon.”
- Robert Graves, Scholar and Poet The Greek Myths (1993)
“Without the Moon there would be no moonbeams, no month, no lunacy, no Apollo program, less poetry, and a world where every night was dark and gloomy. Without the Moon it is also likely that no birds, redwoods, whales, trilobite, or other advanced life would ever grace the earth.” (243)
- Peter Ward, Geologist Gorgon (2004)
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We had ridden into the eaves of the night, driving to a friend’s house, and from there the three of us walked up a disused road – crumbling macadam and cinders – to the familiar gate where we entered the Old Wood of our long friendship. As we arrived at the trailhead, solemn in our togetherness, the Moon cleared the hills on our eastern horizon, casting its mesmerizing light over the Wood and touching us – three sojourners, pathing intuitions – illuminating us in anticipations of adventures yet to be had; possibly – as we always hoped – that very night!
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I have long meditated on the idea that we are Nature having become aware of itself. Walking has been one of the primary ways in which I engage with the natural world; encountering and exploring my specific location on the planet. Experiencing Nature first-hand reminds me of who I am. Whether I take a brief walk in a Little Wood or hike woodland trails for hours or days, the experience of the natural world refreshes my whole being via the engagements to which such walks open up my earthen ‘soul.’ Nature is the objective ‘other,’ in and though engagement with which we weave the tapestries of subjective and intersubjective human meaning. Out of experiences in Nature come an earthen poetics; symbolic, metaphorical, mythical ways of speaking that illuminate our subjectivity and inter-subjectivity.
I am an avid walker. Venturing out into the woods and fields, whether alone or in company with others, is a threshold experience wherein I have the opportunity to leave my normal rounds behind, slough-off my cultural blinders, and engage with Nature and others – humans as well as other animals – in a more direct, unimpeded way. It takes practice to leave the world behind you as you enter into a wooded area – whether an acre or two with paths running through it or a vaster wilderness – yet in time and with practice it has become possible to make the transition more or less with ease.
“Out to the Woods!”
Though walking in daylight is perhaps – on some occasions – the easiest, I yearn to be out in the night, especially when the Moon is up. The nighttime can change almost any natural scene into a mysterious, potentially wondrous place. Even my backyard, small as it is, can be transformed by Moonlight into a Stranger Place. After a hard day at work or play, just standing in the backyard when the Moon is up is sometimes enough to waeccan me to my more earthen self. Further afield, wooded areas, wildwoods and fields are also transmuted by the illumination of the Moon’s soft, cold light into wonderlands and places where fantasy may come to presence in the different sensory world. Going to the woods on a Moonlit Night can be a refreshing, transformative and illuminating experience. Places that are all-too-familiar to me by daylight – to the point where they almost become a mundane backscape to a walk – can seem wholly renewed; open and inviting, mysterious landscapes under the Moon’s sway. These worlds revealed in the Moonlight invite me to explore them all over again, both on-the-hoof and in my Imagination’s memory! I am drawn into a world that seems ‘transfigured,’ though I have no doubt walked ‘that trail’ or entered into ‘that copse of trees’ numerous times during daytime walks.
I noctambulate whenever I get the chance and wherever an opportunity presents itself.
I am a Walker in the Night.
Remembrance of night walks – such as the one alluded to at the head of this blog – inspires and keeps alive in me the sense of what it means to be out in natural places in Moonlight’s sway; being illuminated—and the kinds of experiences I have had, alone and with others, on Moonlit nights. I have journaled many experiences had while out-in-the-Moonlight over the decades; these accounts enabling me – through the memory of imagined scenes – to meditate on the nature and effects of Moonlight on our human animals senses, our consciousness and my emerging poetics of the natural world and our place in it.
I have memories of encounters during night-walks in moonlight, so vivid as to almost be present to me in my mind’s nemeton. Encounters with animals – bears, deer and racoons, cats and possums and whistle pigs – encounters with other people, encounters with imagined existents (e.g., ‘ghosts’) and with projected memories. I have a vivid memory of sitting on my grandmother’s porch with my sister and cousins on an early evening of a long-ago December, entranced by the effect of Moonlight on the enclosed front yard, the grape arbor at its center and the out-buildings of the farm across the lane; structures that were quite ordinary by daylight, but which became somehow ‘otherworldly’ via the Moon’s illumination. I remember lying awake in bed, on innumerable occasions over the years, with the light of the Moon streaming down through the slats in the window blinds, bathing me in its grey-blue effects. I took my first walks in the woods in Moonlight when I was a teenager, and can recall many strange, uncanny moments during adventures in Imagination’s sway.
This is not an experience unique to me, for many people noctambulate! But for me, such memories are both formative of my poetic mind and transformative in spiritual and imaginative ways.
What is it about Moonlight that so attracts me and en-trances my poetic, spiritual and mystical attention? What is the effect of moonlight on a natural setting? I have long sought satisfactory words to body-the-experience-forth.
Understanding begins with the fact that the Moon’s light is reflected sunlight. The Moon’s surface reflects the sun’s light and we receive it on Earth as a cold, soft, diffuse sort of light that activates the photoreceptors in our eyes in particular ways, providing just enough illumination to see to a certain degree darkness. This effect of the Moon’s reflected light on our optical system is different from that of sunlight, which is ‘direct light’ and is experienced as ‘clear’ and ‘warm,’ being communicated to our brains by a different range of receptors in our eyes.[1]
Our experience of Moonlight is consequent to this fact but cannot be reduced to it. Our ocular and our overall sensory system permit experiences that transcend and transform the mere physical parameters. Whenever I go walking when the Moon is up and shining, I am transfigured – like the landscapes in which I amble – by the effect the lunar light has on me. Moonlight’s very peculiar qualities affect one’s senses in very particular ways which have been described in stories, poetry and song down across human time. The experiences people have had in Moonlight and the myths and superstitions that have grown up around the Moon and its light are all rooted in our genetics and physiology, in which our psychology is then rooted.
Wherever I walk at night, the Moon’s light makes fascinating plays on the ground, shining down through leaves and branches, brush and vines, moving scenes of light and shadow as what they silhouette are moved in the breeze. That night, as the leaves were changing into their final mortal forms, the Moonlight was coloring our vision with shapes and even inspiring imagined images of familiar and more alien things. Though less diurnal than some of our mammalian cousins, we are still well-enough night-adapted to see by the light of the Moon. This experience is grounded in our genetics. What we experience – subjectively and intersubjectively – is epiphenomenal to the organic effect of light on our visual system. It fosters an engagement with the phenomenon that can be transformative, potentially transcendental and evermore fantastic!
The limit of our night-vision becomes clear when the night is pitch-black! Hiking when all visible light is absent, you can move only by feeling the ground with your feet to keep from running into things with your arms outstretched, moving them back and forth in front of you! I’ve been out on nights like this! Other animals might be able to see us, but we cannot see them_ much less the trees and other obstacles and fluctuations in the land in front of us!
Moonlight renders the ordinary ‘extra-ordinary;’ at the very least transforming it into something strange and uncanny. There is something quieting and almost enchanting about the quality of the reflected light that shines down upon us from the ‘lunar realm!’ It is important to realize that the Moon does not generate its own light, but reflects the light coming from the Sun. This would seem to play into the very notion that we can become ‘reflective’ – in our senses – under the effect of Moonlight.
The way in which moonlight transfigures a woodland scene, making it ‘soft’ to the senses and seemingly ‘pliable;’ almost ethereal—fascinates the mystical and poetic mind. The direct sense-experience of moonlit woodland scenes is of a different quality from the direct experience of sunlit scenes. To be in the woods at the end of the day and to remain there; walking with the senses open—is to experience the transformation of the landscape through which you are passing. What was ‘familiar’ in one way in daylight becomes unfamiliar – even uncanny – and then, once our eyes adjust, becomes ‘familiar’ again. Both ‘landscapes’ are beautiful in their own way; according to their own being-in-becoming. Our human senses interact with the landscape in physical ways; bodily, psychological, emotion and imaginative!
The effect of moonlight on a natural setting seems to be one of ‘softening,’ as I have often experienced it. It is not really a ‘defocused’ world, as there is much detail to be seen in moonlight; though it is different from the detail seen in the same scene by sunlight. The ‘softening’ creates a sense of texture that is unique to the moonlit world. All objects in the field of vision – trees, stones, water and even soil – seem differently textured than they do in daylight. I often search for words that would describe this texture adequately! Perhaps ‘more corrugated’ where tree trunks and some lithic materials are concerned? Perhaps more ‘plastic’ as with the of water flowing in a creek or down a culvert. Standing water seems, in certain moonlit conditions, to have a less ‘reflective’ surface when viewed at a particular angle, and at times may appear to be ‘solid,’ like glass or ice, as a walking partner of mine once asserted (though I have never had this experience myself).
This always reminds me of the fact of each person’s experience of moonlit scenes being different; each noctambulant will have unique ways of describing what they see and experience. Out in moonlit woods with friends, we have our own peculiar subjective experiences and then unique ways of describing the effects of the moonlight on the natural scenes around us and upon our own consciousness.
No matter how we describe our experiences in moonlight, the experience itself can sometimes be so arresting as to be disarming. But more often, being out on a night-hike illuminated by moonlight re-settles me and quiets my senses. Perhaps in part because of the low level of light; my senses tend toward a kind of ‘rest.’ I often found, when I was a teenager, that being out on a moonlit night at someone’s camp or in the woods, walking alone or with friends, was one of the best vehicles for entering into a meditative, and potentially mystical, state. Not everyone I knew experienced this, but for me it was a profound connection; one that facilitated the development of a ‘lunar spiritual practice.’ Even today, when I go to bed, if the moon’s light is shining in through my bedroom windows, I will sit up and meditate before falling asleep, bathed in moonlight.
This mood of being ‘stilled’ also opens into a kind of ‘transcendence’ and is related to one version of the state in which Inspiration oft arises. Thus, the relationship long known between the Moon and the Muse! Out of such hikes in Moonlight come the touchstones for a poetics of the nighttime, natural darkness and illumination.
Enough for now_
Out to the Woods!
_The Moon is up and the sky is clearing!
“One function of the
moonlight is to evoke a stillness that suggests transcendence.” (21)
- Brian Cosgrove “Wordsworth’s Moonlight Poetry and the Sense of the Uncanny.” Ariel, 1982
[1] The biochemistry of night vision is complex, and there are many good sources that discuss it. It has to do with molecules of a protein that combines photopsin in what are often called the cones – for color vision – and rhodopsin in cells called rods, which are activated in low light – such as Moonlight. It is a fascinating biochemical process. Explore it as you will. – MW
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